They're Baaaaaack!

The more Boston can get colleges to appreciate that a motley streetscape will help their students become fully realized adults, rather than the carriers of suburban consumerist wasting disease that they are now, the better off we’ll be. And anything that slows Boston’s inexorable decline into chain-choked Generica is something we should all cheer, especially with planned developments in Downtown Crossing and on the waterfront bringing two more malls’ worth of franchise stores to the city during the next 10 years.

But the fact is, it may be too late to turn the tide. To understand why, you only have to look at the glitzy new student centers that many local colleges are either eyeing or have already built, an emphasis on nonacademic perks that calls to mind Harry Lewis, the former Harvard dean who rebuked parents of coddled students who “expect the university to treat them like customers, not like acolytes in some temple they are privileged to enter.” While I can sympathize somewhat with the parents—if I were paying more than $200,000 to send my kid to some insipid diploma mill, I’d insist he be ferried from class to class in a golden bathtub filled with rose oil—Lewis’s grouse gets more relevant by the minute: Colleges can help us build transport hubs, fix our schools, diversify our retail sector, and basically function as our de facto city planners. But as long as tuition keeps lapping inflation, and competition among schools for top students keeps intensifying, they’ll continue to be forced to pander to what incoming freshmen want. And when what those kids want is the pampered, anodyne suburban existence they leave behind when they come here to go to college, the result is bad news for the city.

What’s needed is a reimagining of the town/gown relationship. Specifically: We ought to start leaning on colleges to do something about the students themselves, beyond just storing them in luxe dorms so they don’t burn down our neighborhoods. Given that America’s high schools have proved themselves peerlessly adept at converting promising young people into bleary-eyed anthropoids unfit to fold cardboard for a living, this will be no small task. A 2006 study by the New England Board of Higher Education suggested that even as undergraduate enrollment rose in the region, fewer than half of our high school graduates could be considered “college ready.” Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics has reported that basic literacy rates among Americans with bachelor degrees are actually plummeting. In other words, we’re now in a situation where many of our country’s matriculants can’t read properly both before and after going to college—a trend evidenced by a generational rejection of books, and the “like”-peppered subvocalizations that pass for speech in teen and twentysomething Americans.

That’s not to say it’s necessarily the kids’ fault, not when you consider they’ve been incubated in a culture bent on simultaneously narcotizing them, infantilizing them, and artificially ballooning their self-esteem to head off the sort of crippling, corrosive self-doubt that plagues their parents. But it does raise the question of to what extent colleges will choose to follow the rest of society down this bottomless, if extremely lucrative, well. For a high school to spit out graduates with a mental age of 13 is one thing. For a college, it’s a gross abrogation of duty—one keenly felt in a city whose population nine months out of the year is nearly a quarter students. The concern, then, isn’t whether all of Boston will become a college campus. It’s what that campus will look like when our schools finish turning themselves into glorified daycare centers. Now, there’s a vision that chills the blood.